5th Sunday of Easter – 15 May 2022
Last Sunday, the fourth week of Easter, the Church’s liturgy explored the life of the Risen Christ through the imagery of shepherding. Through this image of shepherding the Gospel of John develops the inter-relationship between the life of Jesus and our own lives. The image speaks of the particular bond by which we have both our identity and our direction. It is through this bond, and through this bonding, that we experience the life of the Risen Christ. The bonds that unite us therefore are not incidental to our Easter experience; they are one of the primary means by which we touch the life of the Risen Christ,
How does the life of the Risen Christ touch us? As the theologian, Louis Marie Chauvet wrote so eloquently: the Absent One is Present when the Church re-reads the Scriptures with him in mind, when the Church repeats his gestures in memory of him especially in the breaking of the bread, and in the fellowship shared in his name. Each one of these is essential – and Chauvet’s point is that to focus on one without the other two is illusory. Today’s gospel focuses us on this third aspect in and by which the Risen Christ becomes present – i.e. in and through our bonding with one another. The love we bear one another is one of the indispensable ways by which the life of the Risen Christ manifests itself. It is not simply, therefore, a kind of ‘add-on’ – but rather intrinsic to our experience of the Resurrection.
We talk so freely about love, but indeed it is one of the most difficult experiences to understand fully. Each of us grows into understanding what love is really all about. Discovering it is the adventure of life. It’s not easy to put words around it, but we know, nonetheless, that only with love and through love do we become fully ourselves.
In a little novel called “The Passion” the main character, Henri, who had been personal chef to Bonaparte sits alone after an array of adventures and reflects on what it means to be truly free. “Bonaparte,” he muses, “taught us that freedom lay in our fighting arm, but in the legends of the Holy Grail no one won it by force . . . I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well-regarded or without obligations but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for a moment is to be free.” It is in love that we find our deepest identity, and our freedom comes so paradoxically from our commitments to others.
This paradox of freedom coming out of concrete obligations to others is in itself an echo of the paradox we are celebrating throughout the whole Easter Season. It is an expression of the dying and rising that we are called into by our discipleship of Jesus. Life is constant mystery of dying and rising. But in loving another person we come into this mystery of dying and rising most fully: dying to our own selfishness, our own resistances, our own isolation, and rising to a new awareness. “Love one another,” says Jesus. This is my commandment. The answer to the problem of life is to go out of oneself, to transcend the prison of our own isolation, to reach out to that which is different from ourselves. Love more than yourself, love more than your own ideas, your own way of doing things.
Given that love is so significant, important as oxygen itself, it is surprising that we struggle to define it for most of our lives. As I have struggled to understand the nature of love in my own life, I have come to one particular appreciation of it: and that is, the way that love is integrally linked to listening. In fact, I would go so far now to suggest that love, beyond any feeling, is first and foremost the decision to listen. We love to the extent that we listen, and we listen to the extent that we love. Love is the decision to listen and we continue to love to the extent that we continue to decide to listen; we stop loving when we make the decision to no longer listen. To love is to listen. This is a choice, not a feeling.
It is in our attention to one another, in our watchful care of each other, in that delicate skill of both letting be and guiding, that our life together shows forth both the power and the invitation of the Risen Christ. I am reminded of those beautiful words of Pope Francis at his installation in which he spoke of the nature of a listening become a loving in terms of mutual protection:
“The vocation of being a “protector” . . . means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us. It means respecting each of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live. It means protecting people, showing loving concern for each and every person, especially children, the elderly, those in need, who are often the last we think about. It means caring for one another in our families: husbands and wives first protect one another, and then, as parents, they care for their children, and children themselves, in time, protect their parents. It means building sincere friendships in which we protect one another in trust, respect, and goodness. In the end, everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be protectors of God’s gifts!”
The protection of one another in this sense starts with listening to each other. And the more we listen, the more we will love, as we cannot listen, fully listen, without in the end loving. And the more we love so does the power of the Resurrection shine forth in our world.
